A Modern Instance eBook

He seemed to get a bitter satisfaction out of these mockeries, from which, indeed, he must have suffered quite as much as Bartley.  But he ended, sadly and almost compassionately, with, “Come, come!  You must start some time.”  And Bartley dragged his leaden weight out of the door.  The Squire closed it after him; but he did not accompany him down the street.  It was plain that he did not wish to be any longer alone with Bartley, and the young man suspected, with a sting of shame, that he scorned to be seen with him.

VIII.

The more Bartley dwelt upon his hard case, during the week that followed, the more it appeared to him that he was punished out of all proportion to his offence.  He was in no mood to consider such mercies as that he had been spared from seriously hurting Bird; and that Squire Gaylord and Doctor Wills had united with Henry’s mother in saving him from open disgrace.  The physician, indeed, had perhaps indulged a professional passion for hushing the matter up, rather than any pity for Bartley.  He probably had the scientific way of looking at such questions; and saw much physical cause for moral effects.  He refrained, with the physician’s reticence, from inquiring into the affair; but he would not have thought Bartley without excuse under the circumstances.  In regard to the relative culpability in matters of the kind, his knowledge of women enabled him to take much the view of the woman’s share that other women take.

But Bartley was ignorant of the doctor’s leniency, and associated him with Squire Gaylord in the feeling that made his last week in Equity a period of social outlawry.  There were moments in which he could not himself escape the same point of view.  He could rebel against the severity of the condemnation he had fallen under in the eyes of Marcia and her father; he could, in the light of example and usage, laugh at the notion of harm in his behavior to Hannah Morrison; yet he found himself looking at it as a treachery to Marcia.  Certainly, she had no right to question his conduct before his engagement.  Yet, if he knew that Marcia loved him, and was waiting with life-and-death anxiety for some word of love from him, it was cruelly false to play with another at the passion which was such a tragedy to her.  This was the point that, put aside however often, still presented itself, and its recurrence, if he could have known it, was mercy and reprieve from the only source out of which these could come.

Hannah Morrison did not return to the printing-office, and Bird was still sick, though it was now only a question of time when he should be out again.  Bartley visited him some hours every day, and sat and suffered under the quiet condemnation of his mother’s eyes.  She had kept Bartley’s secret with the same hardness with which she had refused him her forgiveness, and the village had settled down into an ostensible acceptance of the theory of a faint